Why Not the Other Options?

In the decade-plus since Bitcoin’s genesis block, technical people have done an enormous amount of work — yet self-custody itself hardly seems to have moved forward. For most non-technical users, holding and using bitcoin safely is still a heavy subject. After the 2026 Coldcard low-entropy bug, the internet has been full of fear about self-custody — and when technical people offer advice, they usually overestimate how much ordinary people know about computers and information security.

Why not multisig?

“If you advocate for self-custody, you should also be telling people to use a multi-vendor multisig setup.”

— Multi-vendor multisig? No! Based on my experience, for the vast majority of people complexity is more dangerous than hackers, and creating a multisig wallet can be the start of a disaster. Many technical people forget how basic most people’s computer skills really are — just picturing how I’d explain to your uncle that “you not only keep two keys, you also have to keep three master public keys” is enough to make me give up.

Why not wallet.dat?

“Satoshi never used a hardware wallet, and his coins were never stolen. Do what Satoshi did. Bitcoin Core wallet!”

— Get people to babysit a wallet.dat file? Get them to run Bitcoin Core on an offline computer? Get them to remember to check that a newly generated address is already included in the backup? No! That’s far too hard for your uncle — he deserves something simpler.

Why not a paper wallet?

A paper wallet — a private key printed on paper — looks like the simplest thing there is, but removing the signing device turns “generate it safely” and “spend it safely” into new problems: to spend, the key has to be imported into a networked device, one leak and everything is gone, and there is no passphrase layer at all.

These setups have their believers and their users — they are just not fit to be the “default plan”.